Introduction

The research design of “historical meso-regions” (Geschichtsregionen) is a transnational comparative method that has been developed in the historical subdiscipline of East European History as it has emerged in German-speaking countries since the late 19th century. It is also employed by historians of art and of literature who deal with Eastern Europe. In addition, the concept has attracted sporadic interest in general history and social anthropology. Meso-regionalizing historical concepts ranging from “East-Central Europe”, “Northeastern Europe” and “Southeastern Europe” to “the Black Sea World” and the “Levant”, to “Eurasia” and “Arctic Europe” create non-territorialised meso-regions connected by time that cross the boundaries of state, society, nation and sometimes even civilization. They provide a working hypothesis for a comparative historical analysis that aims to identify and delineate specific clusters of structural characteristics over longer periods.

Regional divisions have probably been more salient and their meaning more contested in Europe than in any other part of the world. The debate on this subject is complementary to the ongoing dispute on European exceptionalism, seen as a macro-regional or civilizational feature, and it is no more likely to be settled in definitive terms.
Johann P. Arnason 20051

“Space” or “Region”?

The ongoing debate on a supposed “return of space” or a “spatial turn”2 concerns not only methodology but also content: on the one hand, “space” has become prominent again in the field of historiography as an explanatory tool and a category of investigation; on the other, “space” is no longer the exclusive object of research of neighbouring disciplines, such as geography or sociology. At times, the emotional involvement of both the proponents of “space” and those responding to them is startling.3 Thus, the editors of a collection of articles characterized the “spatial turn” as the replacement of “historiography’s old neglect of space” with “an obsession with space that is no less misleading” and warn:

Alongside this debate, although also partially inspired by it, an older discursive strand is becoming more obvious and paradigmatic – one that does not consider “space” per se, but rather its historical classification in the shape of the “region”, i.e., the branch of research of meso-regional historical concepts. These have developed from the transnational discussions among Central European historians of the interwar period on “Slavdom” and “Eastern Europe” as well as from debates that crossed blocs during the Cold War, above all in the historical sub-discipline of East European history in German-speaking countries from the 1970s onwards. A striking example of this is the fact that the two German historians who have started the debate on the “return of space” with pertinently entitled works – that is Jürgen Osterhammel5 and Karl Schlögel6 – describe in their recent publications the research design of the historical meso-region as an important approach.7 In doing so, they rely on Jürgen Kocka and Hannes Siegrist, who have referred to this approach in the past.8

What is a Historical Meso-Region?

A provisional definition of a meso-regional historical concept could be that it is a historiographical method of transnational comparison with the potential for a middle range theory as well as a research strategy with built-in control mechanisms arising from a solid founding in the sources and comparison. The “historical meso-region” is an investigative framework in the cultural sciences; it is a heuristic artifice that creates non-territorialised meso-regions connected by time that cross the boundaries of state, society, nation and civilization. They provide a working hypothesis for a comparative analysis that aims to identify and delineate specific clusters of structural characteristics over long periods.The various combinations of characteristics, rather than the individual characteristics themselves, are unique and thus cluster-specific. Thus, clusters that cover large areas during a specific epoch can be referred to as historical meso-regions.9 They are “fluctuating zones with fluid borders”, which can accordingly be structured into centres and peripheries.10 Here, too, the specific is unimaginable without the surroundings; one historical meso-region can only be understood in the context of others. Correspondingly, relationism and the dependence on relationships complement the internal structure of a historical meso-region.

“East-Central Europe” as the “Mother of all Historical Meso-Regions”

Although it has universal applicability, the concept of the historical meso-region was developed in an international discussion of historians in the 1920s and 1930s, first on “Slavdom” and “the Slavs” and then on “Eastern Europe”. The leading participants were the Poles Oskar Halecki and Marceli Handelsman and the Czechoslovaks Jaroslav Bidlo and Josef Pfitzner, as well as the German Otto Hoetzsch.11 After the Second World War, Halecki, now an émigré in the USA, turned his views into a model that covered all of Europe. In his book The Limits and Divisions of European History (1950), he differentiated not only between an “old Europe” based on the ancient world and a “new Europe” beyond the historical boundaries of the Imperium Romanum, but also between four modern European historical meso-regions with roots in the Middle Ages: Western Europe, West-Central Europe (Germany and Austria), East-Central Europe and Eastern Europe (Russia/Soviet Union).12 His main goal was to mark a cultural boundary between Western, West-Central and East-Central Europe on the one hand, characterized by the Western churches, and on the other hand of Eastern Europe, dominated by the Eastern Church. Simultaneously, he attempted to relativise the dividing line between East-Central and West-Central Europe – a theme he gave greater emphasis in his broad study Borderlands of Western Civilization (1952).13 Halecki’s influence shaped the development of West German research on East European history, which to a certain extent also drew on earlier concepts such as that of (more localised) “historical landscapes” (Geschichtslandschaft)14 and indirectly the (highly ideologised) “culture areas” (Kulturräume).15 The result was the development of meso-regional historical categories of “East-Central Europe”, “Southeastern Europe” or “the Balkans“, “Northeastern Europe” and “Eastern Europe”; the latter was used both to refer to the East Slavic space and as an overarching supracategory.16 The concept of the “historical meso-region” as a framework for a comparative analysis has its roots in interwar East-Central Europe in two senses: on the one hand, in the attempts at self-affirmation by historians of the states created or recreated in 1918 in the “de-imperialised” region now officially referred to as “East-Central Europe” and, on the other hand, in the rise of the German ethnocentric geopolitical doctrine of Kulturbodenforschung in the wake of the Versailles post-war settlement. In its specific German context, mesoregional historical concepts in general as well as those of “East-Central Europe” in particular are characterised by the well-known dualism between historical research on Eastern Europe (historische Osteuropaforschung) and the tradition of Ostforschung focusing on German settlements in the East.

Just as Halecki was being read in the new German Federal Republic, his ideas were also beginning to exert a subcutaneous influence on the Soviet bloc. In Hungary, Jenő Szűcs,17 Domokos Kosáry18 and Emil Niederhauser19 adopted his concept of “East-Central Europe”, while Jerzy Kłoczowski20 and Henryk Samsonowicz21 did the same in Poland. Above all, they sought to identify structural factors that remained influential over a longer period, normally for several centuries. In reference to the Middle Ages, they mentioned Christianisation, the creation of nationes-states, Magdeburg Law, Ashkenazi Jewish settlement and German internal colonisation (Germania Slavica) – the often overlooked Armenians and Roma should be included here. For the early modern period, historians picked out the high percentage of nobles, the potential of the triad diocese-university-court as a metropolis, libertarian corporate societies and “second serfdom”. In reference to the 19th century, they chose great power domination and linguistic nationalism, and for the 20th century – a “realm of petty states” (Kleinstaatenwelt), National-Socialist domination and occupation, Soviet hegemony, mass movement of refugees, deportations, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, Holodomor, Holocaust and Porrajmos, Sovietisation, but also ecclesiastical and proletarian opposition, political-intellectual dissent and, ultimately, the epochal turning point of 1989 with its genuinely East-Central European innovations such as the Round Table, the “Velvet Divorce” and the cooperation of the Visegrád Group (Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia respectively the Czech Republic and Slovakia).22 Most importantly, Szűcs modified Halecki’s ideas by combining West-Central and East-Central Europe (somewhat incongruously) into what he again called East-Central Europe (rather than Central Europe). His model of the “three historical regions of Europe” – Western, East-Central, and Eastern – remains influential today. Like Halecki, Szűcs used the division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism to separate Eastern Europe (or Russia) from East-Central Europe. However, the Hungarian historian saw an obvious socio-economic and cultural dividing line between the latter and Western Europe; in his view, this cleft exerted an influence from the beginning of the “second serfdom” in the early modern period up to the Cold War.

“East-Central Europe” quickly received wide acceptance as a meso-regional historical concept in the context of the Cold War, both in a narrower and a broader sense. However, the meso-regional concept of “Southeastern Europe” and the overlapping term “the Balkans”became the subject of fierce debate as a result of the wars arising from the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The German historian Holm Sundhaussen disputed Maria Todorova’s rejection of a regional concept of “the Balkans” and her “revelation” of it as a an exclusionist stereotype.23 This provoked intense an discussion,24 as a result of which the differences between the positions reduced noticeably: while Sundhaussen continued to speak of the Balkans as a “historical region”,25 Todorova offered the compromise formula of “historical legacy”. By this she meant the impact by Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, which shape the European territories of these sunken empires up to the present and make them into “historical regions”26 – quod erat demonstrandum.

“East-Central Europe” as an Analytical Framework for Research on the History of Art and Literature

For the discipline of history, the historical meso-region “East-Central Europe” was the starting point for a consideration of meso-regional historical concepts in general. Similarly, in recent research on what the Polish art historian Jan Białostocki’s calls “artistic regions”,27 increasing attention has centred on a concept of “East-Central Europe” that largely corresponds to the terminology of “East-Central Europe” in history-writing. This drew on and criticised the (highly Germanocentric) concept of “geography of art” (Kunstgeographie) developed in interwar Germany.28 In this vein, the Slovak art historian Jan Bakoš investigated in 1993 “the idea of East-Central Europe as an artistic region” using the example of mediaeval painting and sculpture.29 In 1998, a British conference on “Boundaries in Art” examined the approach of “geography of art” in the East-Central European case.30 The German-Russian art historian Marina Dmitrieva gave a largely positive answer to the question “Is there an East-Central European artistic style?”.31 And finally, in 2004 the American art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann demonstrated how innovative and exportable the meso-regional concept of “East-Central Europe” in art history was by applying this approach to Central America and Japan.32

In addition, the pattern of regionalisation within “East-Central Europe” is also applied in the history of literature, for example in the Hungarian literary scholar István Fried’s concept of “Hungarian-Slavic-Austrian literary relationships”:33

Tolstoy in May 1908, four months before his 80th birthday (photographed at Yasnaya Polyana by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky; the first colour photograph taken in Russia) / Wikimedia Commons

Looking at contemporary Polish and Slovak literature, one encounters a “narrative modelling of cultural spaces of interference” by authors such as Andrzej Stasiuk and Dušan Šimko that is conspicuously similar to the meso-regional historical construct of “East-Central Europe”.35 From a typological perspective, political exile, in particular, has vividly brought forth the coherence of East-Central Europe as a literary regional concept.36 The transnational literary impact of the Habsburg monarchy’s historical legacy is also still unmistakable.37 The scholarly research on the reception of literary works from abroad also employs the concept of East-Central Europe. It explains, for example, the considerably greater popularity in the region that Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) traditionally enjoyed in comparison to Lev Tolstoj (1828–1910), Fëdor Dostoevskij (1821–1881) and other representatives of classical Russian literature among Polish, Hungarian, Croatian, and Czech readers using an argument from social history: according to the Hungarian Slavicist Zsuzsa Zöldhelyi-Deák, Turgenev’s treatment of aristocratic culture found great affinity among the societies of East-Central Europe whose reading culture and other cultural features preserved the influence of the gentry.38

Risks and Side-Effects of Meso-Regional Historical Concepts

How do the advantages and risks of employing concepts of this type weigh up? The risks lie in the spreading of such meso-regional historical concepts in political space that denote both one of these concepts as well as simultaneously another category of space – space of action, experienced space (Erfahrungsraum) or imagined space – or in the misunderstandings that must arise as a result. A striking example for the confusion of such concepts on different semantic levels is the title of the two editions of Paul Magocsi’s authoritative and profound historical atlas of East-Central Europe: whereas the first edition was called Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (1993) the second appeared under the title Historical Atlas of Central Europe (2002); both, however, contained the same selection of maps, showing the area from Kaliningrad to Crete and from Odessa to Trieste. Magocsi justified this with a non-scholarly, since political argument:

It has … become clear since 1989 that the articulate elements in many countries of the region consider eastern or even east-central to carry a negative connotation and prefer to be considered part of Central Europe … If Central Europe responds to the preference of the populations of the countries in question, this would seem to lend even greater credence to the terminological choice.39

In order to avoid the dilemma of multiple connotations, the Polish-British art historian Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius turned to a radical measure: she avoids using the term “East-Central Europe” when referring to this art-historical frame of reference as it is tainted by multiple meanings and a high degree of politicisation. Instead, she applies a term taken from contemporary literature – the word “Slaka”40 in Malcolm Bradbury’s novel Rates of Exchange(1983). She uses this term to amalgamate the characteristics of three communist societies – Poland, Bulgaria and China. Her “Slaka” is a post-communist art-historical meso-region coinciding with the historians’ meso-regional concept of East-Central Europe.

Alongside regionalisations, which refer to political geography, mental maps can also intrude upon meso-regional historical concepts. In this vein, Holm Sundhaussen warned against the “intermixture of mental map and historical region”.41 On the other hand, the German historian of Russia Frithjof Benjamin Schenk has set out five potential benefits from meso-regional historical concepts that reveal the possible uses and insights to be gained for the historian’s business. According to Schenk, these are:

overcoming the limitations of national history through transnational comparison;

the dynamism and flexibility of such concepts over time;

the approach’s clinically pure character and its comparative and analytical framework free of contamination by historical “reality”;

its immanent self-critical reference to the self-fulfilling prophecy of concepts of region;

its applicability to Europe as a whole, i.e. that implicit historical region which is so often seen as set in stone.42

The second point, the factor of “time”, requires further explanation, or indeed expansion, because here there is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Despite the concentration on the specific and structural references to space by the different meso-regional historical concepts, one cannot ignore their chronological nature and thus the dimension of time. The historian Wolfgang Schmale therefore suggested to incorporate Reinhart Koselleck’s model of “layers of time” (Zeitschichten) and adopted, in doing so, Norman Davies’s concept of a “tidal Europe”43 – a Europe whose form and content from the ancient world to the present has been pulsating, becoming sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. Using the example of nation-building processes in East-Central Europe, Maria Todorova has demonstrated that the use of a longue durée time frame relativises the differentia specifica of the historical regions under study when compared to the “genuine” Europe, i.e. “Western Europe”, even if it does not remove them entirely.44 The non-simultaneity of the simultaneous is not necessarily non-simultaneous when it refers to a period in time in the sense of a historical process or an epoch instead of a point in time. This seems to be a particularly promising dimension for a future approach to meso-regional historical concepts – to undertake an intra-, but above all an inter-regional comparison not, as in the past, primarily synchronically but diachronically, along parameters such as modernisation or state-building and nation-building, but also others that are less well-tested, such as legal culture, political culture, industrialisation and urbanisation.

The “Historical Meso-Region”: A (Sub-)Disciplinary Breakthrough?

It is obvious that “Europe”, too, is an implicit historical macro-region which requires critical reflection.45 The German historian of Russia Manfred Hildermeier has pointed out that “European” is not a measure of value but a relation, that the opposite of “European” is not “un-European” but rather “extra-European“.46 At the same time, a study of the sub-regions of Europe’s East, above all of Northeastern Europe, Southeastern Europe and Russia, would bring considerable benefits as all these border on other historical meso-regions beyond “Europe” like “Eurasia” and the “Arctic” as well as the “Black Sea World” and the “Levant“. One can therefore agree with Jürgen Kocka who perceives “East-Central Europe as a challenge for a comparative history of Europe”;47 this is true for both the historical meso-region of East-Central Europe as well as in general for the approach of meso-regional historical concepts. Thus, the restriction of the analytical framework of the “historical meso-region” to a single historical sub-discipline has recently weakened; this approach is becoming increasingly attractive for historians outside the field of East European history. E.g., Jürgen Osterhammel, the leading German global historian, in a survey of seven historiographical “models of Europe”, presented a “model of cultural spaces” that incorporated a “model of historical regions” – with explicit reference to Halecki and Szűcs.48 Similarly, the cultural historian Hannes Siegrist talks of “historical spaces” as the central object of study for comparative history – alongside “cultures”, “societies” and “paths of development”.49 The Swiss social anthropologist Christian Giordano has recently applied the analytical framework of the “historical meso-region” in the perspective of his own discipline to all of Europe, including Northern, Western and Southern Europe.50 And the sociologist Johan P. Arnason, who is especially interested in the comparison of civilizations, has placed the increasing interest in meso-regional historical concepts in the context of the debate on the “unique course” (Sonderweg) of European history.51

The assertion by Kocka quoted above proves that things have come full circle: the universalist research design of historical meso-regions that was extrapolated from the East European path of development in the interwar period has – three quarters of a century later – arrived in the discipline of “general” history and other humanities. In the light of the continuing multifaceted impact of the epochal year 1989, it is conceivable that the trend of applying meso-regional historical concepts together with the new interest in time and place will sooner or later result in a “regional turn” in social sciences and the humanities.

For more on this, see the key texts in Aubin, Grundlagen 1965. For Aubin’s place in the spectrum of ideology and academic politics, see Mühle, Für Volk und deutschen Osten 2005. For geographers, the term “cultural areas” has now been decontaminated. See Ehlers, Kulturkreise 1996; Stöber / Kreutzmann, Zum Gebrauchswert von “Kulturräumen” 2001; Miggelbrink, Die (Un-)Ordnung des Raumes 2005; Jordan, Großgliederung Europas 2005. For an equally ideology-free use of the term “cultural area” in ethnology, see Lederman, Globalization 1998; Rolshoven, Von der Kulturraum- zur Raumkulturforschung 2003.

Fried, Ostmitteleuropäische Studien 1994; Fried: East Central Europe 1997. In addition, see Cornis-Pope / Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe 2004. At the same time, the historians of literature have developed the concept of “Central Europe”, for example Konstantinović / Rinner, Eine Literaturgeschichte Mitteleuropas 2001.

Fried, Ostmitteleuropäische Studien 1994, p. 59 (“East-Central Europe is a category that enables a comprehensive, synthetic investigation of … national literatures, not through arbitrary comparison, but through the “confrontation” with the main directions of literatures …. The region under investigation is a literary group of the multi-coloured European literature (literature in European languages) that possess a relative level of independence and characteristics that differentiate it from other regions”, transl. by C.G.).

Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe 2002, p. xiii. As early as 1990, the political scientist Charles Gati prepared the way for this inversion with the dictum “Eastern Europe is now East-Central Europe”. (Gati, East-Central Europe 1990, p. 129).